Teachers honored for planting Ag in school curriculum

WASHINGTON, July 22, 2015 – A year ago, none of the students at a
K-8 school in Hillsborough County, Florida, had experience with agriculture.

“We had a school garden,” elementary school teacher Christine
Danger told Agri-Pulse, “but when we
started (planting), the majority of our kids said, ‘You can’t eat stuff that
was grown in the dirt!’”

Her students’ perception of farming changed dramatically,
however, with the addition of an integrative curriculum during the school year.
All the core subjects – math, language arts, science and more – were covered
during one nine-week period, but different aspects of plants and growing food
were the classrooms’ focus.

The students worked in teams of four on agricultural engineering
design challenges, Danger said. And each grade levels’ project asked them to
address food security in a world that is projected to gain 2 billion people -
for a total of 9 billion people - by 2050.

The kindergarteners, for instance, learned how to recycle water in
a closed system by building terrariums and the first graders built
models of greenhouses. Third graders were tasked with packaging and shipping
live plants, and learned to balance inputs, like soil and water, with costs,
like shipping weight. Middle school kids were asked to solve more involved
problems, such as designing cost-effective vertical farms for use on urban
buildings.

Danger’s classroom work was encouraged – and recently rewarded –
by the National Agriculture in the Classroom Organization (NAITCO), a nonprofit that aims to educate K-12 teachers and
students about the importance of agriculture. Six teachers, including Danger,
were presented with the group’s “Excellence in Teaching about Agriculture”
award at NAITCO’s recent conference in Louisville, Kentucky.

Lisa Gaskalla, the group’s president, said the conference shows educators
how to use agricultural concepts “to jazz up their classroom instruction” and “showcase
innovative teaching strategies in workshops, awards presentations and tours of
agricultural operations.” The bottom line, she said in a press release, is that “agriculture
is a great way to teach core subjects and familiarize students with where their
food, fiber and fuel come from.”

The agricultural think tank AGree concurs, and recently released a
report that describes a disjointed and ineffective system of
K-12 food and ag education in the U.S. The report contained five key
recommendations and identifies five needed reforms.

“We need to step up our
game when it comes to food and ag education in both rural and urban America, or
we will be woefully unprepared to compete in the global marketplace, which is
now vital to U.S. agriculture,” said Dan Glickman, AGree co-chair and former
U.S. agriculture secretary.

First, the report
recommends creating a system that assesses or ranks the effectiveness of
available curricula in food and ag education. Other recommendations include
linking food and ag education to STEM (science, technology, engineering and
math) programs and establishing a program that would provide additional funding
for top performing initiatives, beyond what’s provided under federal
legislation known as the Perkins Act.

The
remaining suggestions include conducting a national survey to assess
agricultural literacy and establishing a committee to review progress in the
area of food and ag education. Such a committee would follow in the footsteps
of a National Academies of Science committee formed in 1985 to assess the
contributions of ag education to productivity and competitiveness, and a project
to reinvent ag education funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in the late 1990s.

Jim Moseley, AGree co-chair
and a former deputy agriculture secretary, said, “So much is required of
producers today – skills in agronomy, natural resource management, information
technology, and business. I’m confident that young people are up to the
challenge, but there is much more we can do to prepare the next generation of
farmers and ranchers.”

Théo Anderson, another NAITCO honoree, is doing her part to
prepare students through chicken husbandry. The elementary school teacher
hatched her idea to use chickens as part of her curriculum in Cache County,
Utah, when her class was studying life cycles.

Anderson asked a former student, who was an Eagle Scout, to build
a chicken coop for her current students to raise chickens in during the summer.
And that’s when Hens for Hunger was started.

Students in Anderson’s class enrolled in the “Chicken Power Club”
to take care of the laying hens during the summer until they produced eggs.
Those eggs were then sold and the proceeds were donated to the local food
pantry. Her class also starting raising mealworms, which develop into beetles, to feed the chickens, and the students built an outdoor garden fertilized with compost that they made
from chicken waste and fruits and vegetables left over from school meals.

They don’t just learn the curriculum, “they also
learn the work of it,” Anderson said. “I'm hoping they'll want to have their own gardens
and (continue to) compost.”

Four other individuals were selectedas “Teachers of the Year” for their distinguished work in weaving
agricultural concepts and principles into innovative public school curriculums: Leslie Preston Meredith of Kentucky, Darlene Petranick of North
Carolina, Rachel Parker Morris of Tennessee, and M.K. Preston of Virginia.

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The world of agriculture extends beyond what’s growing in your field or living in your barn, and here at Agri-Pulse, we understand that. We make it our duty to inform you of the most up-to-date agricultural and rural policy decisions being made in Washington D.C. and examine how they will affect you – the farmer, the lobbyist, the government employee, the educator, the consultant and the concerned citizen.